On Dec 15, 2004, at 6:11 PM, Abhijit Mahabal wrote:
David Storrs wrote:On Dec 15, 2004, at 5:36 PM, Abhijit Mahabal wrote:Until now, the policy in Perl has always been that it is as slack and forgiving as possible, and you have to ask if you want it to be strict with you. I hope that doesn't change.
I think that "slackness-on-demand" is a better policy than "strictness-on-demand", but that, again, is just my opinion....
--Dks
There should be little reason to complain so long as it is drop-dead easy to turn on slackness. S01 says:
# Perl 5 code is not strict by default, while Perl 6 code is. But it should be easy to relax with -e or maybe even a bare version number:
perl -e '$x = 1'
#!/usr/bin/perl -e $x = 1;
#!/usr/bin/perl v6; $x = 1;
Of course, you can counter that with "there should be little reason to complain so long as it is drop-dead easy to turn *strictness* on". But in either case, people are going to trip over this, expecting one(strictness/slacknesss) but getting the other. In one case (expecting slackness, but getting strictness from the compiler) it would be easier for the compiler to know that they have in fact tripped.
--abhijit
Obviously, however @Larry decide it should be, is the way it'll be and nothing I can say will change that.
That said: this would suck. Badly.
We should not be optimizing for the compiler's convenience, but for the programmer's.
Although I can't prove it, I strongly suspect that the majority of times that someone sits down to do something with Perl, it's a quick one-liner or short script. Strictness just gets in the way for those. (And, for the record; I make my living writing Perl, mostly large programs, and I always use strict in those programs. I want strict. I like strict. Strict is good. I just don't want strict by default.)
--Dks
